“I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.”

“The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.”

“I choose this story above all others because it's a story I'm struggling to end. ”

“If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.”

“It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.”

“I am an ambitious writer – I don’t see the point of being anything, no, not anything at all, if you have no ambition for it.”

“I was in those days all about the 'fuck you'. Fuck you for not recognising how great I am. I'll do it myself.”